Homegrown Radio 3/18/11 – John Hayes

Happy Friday!  I’m back with another shot at Homegrown Radio, & this week I’m featuring a song I’ve done since I began performing solo that is in a bit of a different blues style—it’s “Katie Mae” by the great Lightnin’ Hopkins.

I posted a video performance of this song what seems like ages ago.  Generally speaking, I’m not all that satisfied with the performances in those videos, but the “Katie Mae” take wasn’t bad & still gets some hits on YouTube.  However, I both play & sing better now than I did when I made those videos, so I’m happy to post the version of “Katie Mae” I put on my cd, RFD Blues.

In this version, I’m doing the song in the key of F—playing the chords in E in standard tuning with a capo on the first fret.  “Katie Mae” is a straight ahead 12-bar blues tune with delightful lyrics, & I’ve always found it a joy to play.  It also makes a good song to start a set because it moves along & is light-hearted.  Tho I’d like to say I first heard one of Lightnin’ Hopkins’ versions of it, I must admit that my first exposure to the song came in my high school years when listening to the Grateful Dead’s Bear’s Choice album.  It was sung by Ron "Pigpen" McKernan, who was a doggone good blues singer.  But nobody can do it like Lightnin’!

Anyway, if you’ve been following along, you know the info on the music from the cd.  I’m not selling the cds online, only at live performances.  However, you can get the mp3s for all the songs for free as follows:
Two ways to do it.  If you’re only interested in downloading a handful of the songs, the easiest way to do this is to go to the DivShare page at this link.   Once on that page, you’ll see an embedded mp3 player that should have “Preachin’ Blues,” the first song on the playlist queued up.  Below that you’ll see a button that reads “DOWNLOAD,” & still further below that, three columns containing the songs.  All of these should be highlighted except “Preachin Blues.”  If you click on a song, it will then appear in the mp3 player.  When you click on the DOWNLOAD button, you will download the song that’s currently in the player.

If you’d like the whole playlist, along with jpg images of the CDs front & inside covers, you can download that as a zip file right here.  The zip file is 49 mb, which is about average for the typical music CD's worth of song.

Hope you enjoy “Katie Mae”!